Tyler Cowen and Russ Roberts on Nation, Immigration, and Israel 1/17/22

Today is December 23rd, 2021, and today's episode of EconTalk is also being released as an episode of Conversations with Tyler. I'm speaking with Tyler Cowen of George Mason, who blogs at Marginal Revolution, podcasts at Conversations with Tyler. It's his 14th appearance here on the program. He was last here in April of 2021 talking about the pandemic. We're going to do something a little unusual today. We're gonna talk about what it's like to be an immigrant, using my move to Israel this year as a way to launch the conversation. As my listeners know, and to let listeners at Conversations with Tyler know, I came to Israel to be president of Shalem College, a small liberal arts college here in Jerusalem. And finally, I wanna encourage EconTalk listeners to go to our homepage to vote on your favorite episodes of 2021. Tyler, welcome back to EconTalk.

Thank you very much for having me. I'm so curious about your new ventures. Let me start with a general question. In the mature economies, why aren't there more new universities? Shalem is in its 9th year. And how is starting a new university in Israel different from in the United States?

Well, we have a very strange business model. Uh, we lose money on every student and we make it up by volume. Uh, we, we don't, uh, we We give all of our students a stipend that covers their tuition and a chunk of their, good chunk of their living expenses. And as a result, in America, if that were the case, we take no money from the government. It's all private donations. And we're in competition, we like to think, for the best students here in Israel. So they often are on scholarships. So we have to match that. And that's the business model. In America, if you don't take money from the government, you usually get less regulation. In turn. That is not the case here. The Council of Higher Education is extremely vigilant in making sure that we keep all of our promises, and they're very, very, uh, detail-oriented. Uh, number of toilets, I think, is regulated here per, per student. Uh, so you can imagine starting a new major is, um, we've got to get their approval. We have to provide the syllabi of all the classes that would be taught in the major. We have to show the faculty that would be teaching in the major, and we have to get a variety of committees to sign off on it. So to To create a whole college is a major enterprise. The people who came before me did all that lifting, heavy and light. And, you know, in America, the challenge, of course, is both accreditation and reputation. You're in competition with existing, like any new entrant, you have to compete with the existing competitors. And in case of college, brand name is extremely important in America, obviously. People have emotional ties to colleges. So I think, you know, they're very, very, very few new colleges that are at the highest level. As you know, of course, University of Austin is aspiring to be one of those startups in America, but it's not an easy task.

So being a university president, it also has a managerial side. How are you feeling managerial culture as being different in Israel? Compared to the United States?

Well, you know, I don't have a lot of managerial experience. I kind of took a leap of faith.

You managed your own career, your entire life.

Yeah, tremendous experience. And that meant managing a very difficult person, actually. So it's actually quite encouraging. In all seriousness, the job, I've grown in the 6 months I've been on the job and on the ground here. It's been a wonderful experience, adventure. We'll talk about what it's like to live here, but to flex a bunch of muscles that I haven't used much or that I didn't know I had. It's a very multifaceted job. There's managing people, there's curriculum and faculty and student issues, there's fundraising. It's—

Can you be more direct about managing in Israel? There's a reputation. That Israelis are super direct, they don't mince words. Like, is that true? And how does that influence how you manage people? Do you just tell them what to do? Do they tell you what to do? Or how's it different?

Well, I think there's a lot of, a lot of my management team at the senior level speak English and are Americans. So even though they're Israelis now and they're all citizens of Israel, as I am, they bring a lot of their American baggage with them, even though they've unpacked for sure. In terms of the staff and the students, there is a directness. You know, with the students, it's quite interesting. They come here when they're typically 23, 24 years old to start their college career, very different than in America. And despite having served in the Army, they are remarkably young in a certain way. They have an energy and an openness that's very refreshing. The bluntness part, I don't sense so much on their end. In terms of the staff, It's not really an issue. At least I haven't experienced it. What I think it causes though is a certain hesitation on my part for interaction. I've got the language barrier for the native Israelis here. I try to speak Hebrew with them to amuse them. And they're very kind. And then we typically end up speaking in English if it's anything substantive outside of how was your weekend. And they're very blunt. Straightforward. I kind of like it.

You're an Adam Smith scholar, and as you know, Smith and many of the other classical economists, they were worried about the decline of martial virtue in a commercial society with division of labor. And now that you've lived in Israel, how does this worry seem to you? More justified? Totally false? Or how do you view it?

It's a deep question. I appreciate the flattery of calling me a Smith scholar. Um, I wrote a book on Smith, which of course makes me an expert, but I'm not really an expert. The martial side, the military side here is utterly fascinating. There's a big conversation going on, going along, going around here about whether Israel should continue with the draft or go to more model close to the United States of a volunteer army. It's an enormous socializing experience here for the young people to go through that. It's, you know, challenging, difficult. Often physically difficult. And it permeates a lot of life here. In the way that there are certain networks of college, for example, in America, or a private school system, you have a certain natural connection to the graduates. Here in Israel, the unit you were in, the kind of unit you were in, the people that you were in that unit with, I think has a very powerful lifelong a fact. It's jarring often to an American who comes here. There are a lot of people walking around with their Uzis, their automatic weapons. First time you see that, it's a little bit scary. Second time, it can be okay. You feel pretty— it's kind of comforting. But it's a part of life here along with reserve duty and other— I have students who missed the first 3 weeks. We have students here who missed the first 3 weeks of class because they had reserve duty. Or they were on some project. And that's intense. It's just very alien to most Americans.

Given the rising importance of cyber warfare, it seems for Israel most of all, should Israel still have a draft? Isn't the future of Israeli security drones, cyber defense, cyber attacks, other advanced weapons? It's a tech story rather than a personnel story. Yes, no?

Yeah, you'd think so. I think for the— and that may part of be partly what's driving the having a conversation about a volunteer army. Israel doesn't have the personnel needs that it had for an army that it would've had 20 years ago. There are a lot of units here where people in them can't tell you what they're in because they're, I think, highly classified, highly involved in those kind of cybersecurity issues. I think it's a big issue for the world. It's going to be an incredible thing to see how this changes warfare in general. It's— but it's a key part of Israel's arsenal. Obviously, they've been very successful in using cyberattacks to slow down Iran's nuclear program, for example. At least that's the understood— that's the received wisdom.

The Israeli military plus conscription still over time produce that sense of social solidarity if the military personnel themselves are not in the long run responsible for national security? Won't it become a kind of Straussian façade and at some point fade away or be viewed cynically or not serve its original socially unifying function?

I don't know. I think there's a lot of cohesion here that we're not seeing. You know, it's a very fractious political environment here, as you know. A lot of political parties, parliamentary system, no constitution, a lot of yelling in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. But despite all that, because of, I think, the external threat, there's a lot of cohesion here, whether there's an army or not. The other part of the army that I think is fascinating is the age of the people in leadership positions, you know, very early in their career. There are people in their mid-20s, early 20s, who have the lives of, you know, 100 or more people in their hand as they're in their units. It creates a different kind of mentality here. I can't say I've sensed it personally, but that's my impression. I don't know what will happen. It's a fascinating question. What will happen to Israeli social life if, if the army becomes less central? But right now, that's not the case. It's very—

As you know better than I do, the Israeli media landscape is very different from the American media landscape. Though they overlap. How has that changed your mind about podcasting? How do you view podcasting differently from Israel?

It's a lot of work podcasting from Israel. One of the start challenges of moving here is that a huge chunk of my life gets crammed into 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM, because 3:00 PM is kind of the earliest you can expect somebody for a meeting or an interview in the United States. When it's gonna be 8:00 PM on the East Coast, and certainly on the West Coast, it's even a bigger difference. So starting around 3:00, my day tends to get a little more crowded and intense. So just on a logistics matter, it's challenging. I don't have a very good feel for the newspaper world here, but newspapers are much more important than they are in America. They haven't died out. They're not just online. It's fun to walk around on a, afternoon or a morning in Jerusalem and see 4 or 5 different newspapers out for sale, even if I can't read all of them or most of them, and sometimes any of them, because my Hebrew is so embryonic and mediocre. But they come with a flavor. And I think that's part of what you were alluding to. They're more like TV in America, right? They have often an ideology and a certain perspective. American newspapers until recently, I would say, pretended they were objective. I think there's less of a pretense lately, but how podcasting fits into that, you know, I don't know. I listen to some Hebrew language podcasts, and my Hebrew is not good enough to listen to the other ones. I should maybe be trying, but— You've remarked— Podcasting—

You've remarked to me in the past that in Israel, baseball seems less important to you. Does podcasting seem more or less important there?

That's interesting. Sports does seem less important, partly 'cause the games are on often at 3:10 in the morning here, which kind of reduces my, and I'm not a recorder kind of person, don't have time to watch them at my leisure so much anyway anymore. Econ talk doesn't seem less important, but I am surprised at how much I enjoy the challenge of improving the classroom here. We have an amazing set of teachers here. I want 'em to be better. We're trying to make the evaluation process a little more sophisticated and less a customer service on a scale of 1 to 5, how'd you like your faculty member, your professor? Trying to inculcate certain, inculcate our faculty to certain styles of teaching and expose them to certain ideas. And I'm enjoying that much more than I thought I would. And I'm much more passionate about it. I'm a little bit dangerous, Tyler. You know, I'm what's called in Hebrew, a new oleh, one who's, who's come upward, who's come up to the land, the land of Israel. And I find my passion for things Israeli and my national identity way out of line with what I thought it would be as a person who's— I've been here many times. I've been here a dozen or so times to visit. I lived here as a teenager for 8 months when I was in high school with my family. My dad's company sent him here. So I sort of thought I knew what it would be like to live here. I knew it wouldn't be the same as being a tourist, but I've been surprised that at how much national pride I have, how I'm not quite as interested in what's going on in America. I thought I'd stay connected, either sports, politics, which is just a different form of sports sometimes. But it's very different. And I think, you know, you read stories of immigrants who come to America and who are very emotional when they pass their citizenship tests. I feel the same thing here. And it's been a pleasant surprise.

What in the Torah now feels different when you read it living as an Israeli? In the Torah?

In the Torah?

Or the Hebrew Bible more broadly.

In the Jewish Bible? Yeah. No, no, no, I just thought I'd make sure I heard you correctly. It's interesting sitting in Jewish, in a synagogue here on Saturday morning, which I used to do in America. The most, the biggest difference isn't the Torah reading, it's the It's a blessing for the State of Israel, which gets recited every morning, every Saturday morning in a Jewish synagogue in America. It gets— there's also a prayer for the soldiers of the IDF, the Israel Defense Force. It's much more visceral here. People pay attention. You feel like you're actually saying something that matters and that means something. As for the Torah, I think the biggest thing that I felt actually wasn't in services or reading The Bible, it's exploring different parts of the country I hadn't ever been to before. When we first got here, early on, we went up north to the Golan Heights, which Israel didn't have access to until the 1967 War. It's still controversial in some quarters, of course. It's really a stunningly beautiful part of the country. And you can walk a town called Gamla. Gamla is a was a Jewish town in Roman times that the Romans destroyed, a little bit like Masada. And they've uncovered the mosaic floor of a synagogue. There's some houses, the floors and rooms of a house, walls of partial houses are still visible. And it's a very wild part of the country. There's big ravines and outcrops. And then in the distance, you can see the Sea of Galilee. The Kinneret in Hebrew. And it just felt different that there's a Jewish presence in that outpost in the middle of nowhere that's 2,000 years old. It's, I feel part of something that, now obviously intellectually, I felt it before I moved here, but moving here and feeling that's very different and being there and standing on that climb, having that town to ourselves, my wife and I, we hiked to the top. It's a little tiny space, hard to believe that A few thousand, thousands of people live there. But it's a crazy, crazy archaeological experience to be part of that and other things like it. So that's what's to me is more special. The holiest part of Israel, most people would say, would be the Temple Mount. A Jew would say is the Temple Mount and the Kotel, the wall, the supporting wall of the Temple Mount that Jews pray at. Every day now, if they're back, we have access to it since 1967. And, you know, Jews have been praying there for thousands of years. It's very moving to be there. I'm about an 18 or 20-minute walk from there. And I've been there once since I've been here. In the past, I'd come here, every trip, I had to make sure I got to the Kotel and the Old City. And I'm surprised how little I've been there. The sort of workaday suburban, not suburban, but urban streets of Jerusalem, feel special in a way that doesn't require that past hovering over it. It's just—

it's a great book's emphasis at Shalem, if I understand correctly. If you had a bit more time than you probably have and wanted to choose one or two great books, Hebrew Bible aside, of course, to make sense of your time and experience in Israel, what would you pick and why?

Well, you know, our students— it's crazy We're a Great Books curriculum, but sort of, but there's so many things we try to cover because we also have not just Western civilization, but Jewish thought and also other civilizations, our neighborhood, Middle East, the Middle East neighborhood. So our students read the Jewish Bible, they read the Talmud, they read the Quran, they read the New Testament. And we have a course on Indian culture, civilization, and religion as well. So it gets a little crowded. It gets a little crowded. You're asking me though, what book—

To make sense of your own experience in Israel, which great book?

Well, I'm a sucker. I think I'd pick "The Odyssey." You know, it's about travel adventures, a sense of home, a very reliable wife who's come with me for this adventure. And I've been writing about it recently for my next book, Penelope's decision and dealing with the absence of her husband. But the idea of that book, which I think is just one of my favorite books, is The Odyssey, is the idea that home pulls you, right? And now I have two homes. It's a little bit weird, right? I was born in Memphis, Tennessee. I've never lived long anywhere in the United States. Maryland's the longest. My time in America when I was teaching at George Mason and later working at the Hoover Institution, which I'm still affiliated with, by the way, 18 years of my 67 were spent in suburban Washington, DC, which is roughly a quarter and certainly more than a quarter of my adult life. And so there's a certain home there. I have certain friends there. And now all of a sudden, this feels like home. And I don't know what Odysseus was, he must have had a lot of ups and downs when he was thinking about whether to come home or not, but he came home. So I think that helps me a little bit.

Yeah, the United States has, I think, about 330 million people, yet there are more Israeli TV shows I want to watch than American TV shows. There's "Ruach HaKodesh," there's "Shetizel," there's "Prisoners of War," there's "In Judgment," there's "Tehran," there's more. Why is Israeli TV so good?

Uh, I'm glad you mentioned Prisoners of War. It doesn't get enough, uh, prison wars in my top 5. If I had to list my top 5, I'd pick, I'd pick Stiesel, Prisoners of War, The Americans, probably The Wire, and The Crown. What would your— do you have a top 5?

My number 1, uh, Through Game and Prisoners of War plausibly would be in my top 5. So Prisoner, Curb Your Enthusiasm, that's in my top 5.

Oh well, yeah, yes, very different thing. Yeah, it's, uh, it's very different. I mean, what I love about those, those other ones when they're done well is they're a form of long-form storytelling is simply not available to us until now. The closest thing I guess you could have had to it in the past would be a Dickens novel that came out every week, and you couldn't binge You couldn't binge read it, you had to wait for the next installment. And I think, I'm sure there's been many PhD theses written about why, how the impact of that weekly thing affected Dickens' style and so on. But it's an interesting question. I'm gonna, I have an answer, let me give it, but I wanna hear your answer first. What's your answer?

I think the audience is more demanding and has evolved into an equilibrium where they expect something more intellectually substantive from television. And precisely because it's not economically so viable, the notion that at the margin you get a much bigger audience by pandering to more people just doesn't go that far in Israel. Now, this may change as Israeli shows themselves become more popular, so I worry about this. But that would be my offhand answer: smarter, more demanding audience, plus limited incentives to sell out.

That's really interesting. I, you know, There's some really bad Israeli TV shows that I've enjoyed that take weird and strange turns. I'll mention "The Good Cop," "Pashoter HaTov," which is really often in really bad taste and quite amusing that, you know, all of a sudden gets really serious in season 2 or 3. It starts off as this sort of silly comedy, similar to "The Beauty and the Baker," which is this cheesy, you know, there's an American version of it too, but in the Israeli version, it's this baker He somehow gets tangled up with this movie star, this model, and she's a model, I guess, not a movie star, but you think, ah, it's cheap fun. And all of a sudden it gets really serious. Their families get involved and it takes these strange and inexplicable turns. And I'm sure it's partly driven by the economics of the business. But I think there's another thing to think about, which is, Jews created Hollywood. Jews have been making good movies for a long time. And, you know, we're called the people of the book. We're interested in storytelling. Just a standard thing Jews have been doing for a long time. Now, why Israelis per se are so good at it is an interesting question. It's obviously a function of wealth and the ability now to market those stories to a much wider audience. But I think your point about how, you know, subtitles and Netflix allowed that to reach a much wider audience than was available before. And so it really is kind of a puzzle. They're not particularly designed, I don't think anymore, for the Israeli market. And the real puzzle to me is why they're popular now, why they're so good, right? Why do people wanna watch a, Shtisel, which is—

It's actual romantic tension. That's the thing with Shtisel and Srugim. In American shows or even European shows, well, you can— "Oh, why don't they just divorce?" Or, "Why don't they just go to bed together?" Or, "Why don't they just whatever?" But in Srugim and Shtisel, it's always a question what the boundaries are. And that's hard to recreate.

Yeah, it's— Yeah, one of my favorite scenes in Shtisel's one, Akiva and I think it's— Uh, Butcheva are standing. She pretends, or is actually interested in buying, in renting a heater from him, a portable radiator. And he's just started this business. He's put up a sign around town. It's very entrepreneurial for him. He's got— he doesn't get— doesn't have much to do with himself other than art. And she shows up at the doorway, and it lasts about 30 seconds. There's incredible tension in that scene, romantic and sexual tension, and it's because they can't They're not going to do anything. And they're good actors. And so it's a very powerful scene. I've also argued, I think part of the appeal of that show, there's a certain anthropological voyeurism. Here's a culture and a community that's very alien to most people, including modern Orthodox Jews. It's a very different form of religious Judaism, the ultra-Orthodox that they're portraying in that show. And part of the charm of the show is that, well, they have the same problems we do. They have trouble with their kids. They're not sure whether they're gonna make a living. And so that's part of the charm. But I think the other part of the charm is what you're talking about. There's a certain old-fashionedness there that people may not wanna live that way themselves, but they like watching it the way they like reading a Jane Austen novel where the mores of romance are long gone in the past. And there's a certain innocence, I think, to the characters in Stiesel, which makes it so deeply appealing. The only other observation I want to make, which I think is so fascinating to me is, it's a show about religious, ultra-religious, ultra-Orthodox Jews. There's almost no Judaism in the show. You know, they murmur and mutter blessings under their breath. But there's no glorification of, say, the religious experience of the Shabbat. And they don't make fun of it either. There's no mocking of it or of the attitudes. They're just taken as they are. And I think that was a genius move by the creators to make that show the way it is.

Which Israeli norm is hardest for you to deal with?

Um, negotiation is challenging. I think it's particularly hard for my wife, who likes set prices. A lot of prices here are just kind of suggestions. They're an invitation to negotiate. And, um, There are a few settings in America where that's normal. You buy a house or a car, you don't expect to pay list price. But you do expect to pay list price for, say, a haircut or, I don't know, a repair or something, you know. But a lot of times, the price they announce is just like a hint or a suggestion. And it's very hard for Americans to respond to that. If you come here and you get off the plane and you get in a cab, I don't think the price— this happens in America, right? Prices in America in a cab off the meter are often negotiated. The cab driver will say something and say, "How about if we don't use the meter? How about a flat rate?" But in America, you kind of know what it's gonna be 'cause you've been in the cabs in America. As a newcomer, you don't always know how far it's gonna be, what the real fare should be. And so you're kind of vulnerable. And so a lot of Americans I know get angry when the cab driver says, "Let's take it off the meter and pay cash." They say, "Well, no, put it on the meter." And then a friend of mine was telling me he got yelled at by the cab driver. Like, "I don't want to put it on the meter." I was thinking, "But that's the job. That's the rule. Come on, put it on the meter." And I think that the anger of the cab driver was really just, "Hey, we're negotiating here. We're having fun. Here's the game. It's not theater, but it is a game." And there is some theater involved, because you don't know how the drama is going to end. But I think here, it just, It's a little bit of the fabric of daily life, right? And that's a little strange. It takes some getting used to. I think when I rented my apartment here, I think it was an 8 or 10-page lease. I had to hire a lawyer. Never had a lawyer for a lease. I've rented a dozen places and 20 places in America. That was strange. What I do to sign the lease, things I had to do to get the lease done. You know, insurance I bought, weird stuff that just doesn't happen in America, and it's all in Hebrew. So that part's kind of challenging. Um, anything else? No, no.

An Israeli friend of mine suggested I ask you the following question, quote, "Are you tired of being a fryer?" unquote.

Yeah, fryer is the slang phrase. I assume it's Yiddish.

It sounds—

yeah, there's a few Yiddish words that that get peppered into Israeli daily speech. Not much, not like you'd think, 'cause of course the early days of Israel was very much a revolt against the Eastern European mentality. And the Hebrew was gonna be spoken here, not Yiddish. And Jews here were gonna be strong and proud, not hunched over a book. And they were gonna fight in the army. And there's a certain huge pride actually in that here. But, and as a result, The best language is Arabic. There's an enormous number of Arabic words that are used daily. I like to tease my Israeli friends that there's no Hebrew word for fun. And when you tell them that, they say, "Well, yes, there is, keff." It's an Arabic word. They had to import it. It's kind of a cheap shot at the seriousness of life here, and it's not true. There's a lot of vibrancy and people here have a lot of fun, but there's no native Hebrew word for fun. I blame it on Ben-Yehuda. But the word fun, Fryer is a very, very interesting word. And it's an interesting aspect of Hebrew nature, of human nature, because it means a sucker. And some Americans here will talk about the fryer tax, you know, the amount of money extra you pay because you just don't know what you're doing here. You're just lost. You don't know the norms. And I try not to worry about being a fryer. I view it as a form of charity. You know, I've been, I've I have a comfortable life, I can pay a little bit extra, it's not a problem, happy to do it. But people worry about it, I think emotionally, and I think it's an important part of human nature that economics doesn't have much to say about. The fear that you're being taken advantage of drives a lot of bad behavior on both sides of various transactions if you don't have a good level of trust.

As you well know, a significant portion of the population of Israel is Arabic in descent. What do you think you're learning about those Arabic cultures living in Israel?

Not as much as I'd like to yet. I mean, I've only been here 6 months. There's a lot of— it partly depends on where you live, of course, but in the parts of Jerusalem that I live in and walk in near our campus here, there's a lot of Arab Israelis. Most people don't know this. I don't know it well, so I may embarrass myself, but people who are born within the borders of the Jewish state right now and the borders of Israel who are not Jewish, Arab Israelis, are full citizens. They get full healthcare, they get to go subsidized to the universities, they vote. They don't serve in the army, which is fascinating. They don't wanna serve in the army, incidentally, which I also understand is complicated for them. And those are distinct from the West Bank and Gaza who are Palestinians. Then there's some special categories of folks who live in East Jerusalem, which is a disputed, more challenging, and I don't know all the ins and outs of that. But my wife, is going to Ulpan. Ulpan is Hebrew lessons. She goes to Ulpan 3 hours a day, 4 days a week. 22 of her 23, I think, or 21 of her 23 classmates are Arab, Arab-Israelis who think their Hebrew is not good. And they all speak Hebrew. They speak very good English, but their Hebrew is not good enough. So they're improving their Hebrew because they want to go to a good university. They want to get a good education. They want to be in business, and they're all young, by the way. They're all in their, in their 20s. But I don't have, I don't have much exposure to, to the Arab-Israeli population yet. So I'm— that's something to find out.

We're both non-Muslims. What is it you think we can or should learn from the Quran?

I don't know the Quran. I love The Muslim, the religious Muslims I've met face to face, as opposed to the ones that, you know, the, the are called the cultural zeitgeist of Islam that's in the air in the West. But the actual Muslims that I have met face to face, um, you know, I have a lot in common with them. We, we, we believe in God. I think they have a very deep, deep faith, uh, which Some Jews have, but not all. Even religious Jews, I think, struggle with faith in a way that many Muslims and Christians, for that matter, don't struggle with. So I think there's something to learn there. I think it's possible. I'm naive. I like to think there's a way that the the great religions of the world would get along a little bit better, the followers of those religions. And on the ground face-to-face, I think we get along pretty well, but it's not going so well overall, so in the outside world. So here's the work to do. And as an economist, I like to think that commercial interaction helps. Do you think that helps? Do you think it's a, think trade, Do you take— what do you think of this view that trade leads to peace?

I think it's been overrated by many of us. At many margins, clearly it's true. Trade also helps you build up weaponry. Trade can solidify groups within a nation. Um, an overrated proposition, though on average true. That's how I would classify it.

Yeah, I like that. I'm going to use that.

So late 19th century Europe had plenty of trade, right? The world was remarkably globalized. And you get World War I, you get World War II. I'm not saying the trade caused that, but you can see it's what you might call a complicated regression. Yeah, here's another religious question. The Knesset recently, as you know, they voted to loosen up kosher certification regulations and take away power from a group of rabbis. That's a kind of deregulation.

Yep.

You're a market-oriented economist. Are you happy, or should you be worried as a religious observant Jew that this could mean a higher probability of some Israelis eating non-kosher food?

Yeah, it's a fascinating example. Um, listeners should know that the Stiesel family is not the modal family in Israel. The ultra-Orthodox are a percentage of the country, and they're a politically powerful percentage because they tend to vote as a bloc. But there are really all kinds of variations now, both religiously and non-religiously in Israel that are extremely fascinating. The many Jews here are secular. Their Judaism is that they live in a Jewish state. Now, there are other Jews who are religious, And then in between that, there's all kinds of stuff happening here that's really fascinating. I recommend the book The Wandering Jew by Micha Goodman, Micha Goodman, that came out in the last few years about what's going on on the ground here in Israel and the amount of religious innovation that's happening and how people who are, quote, not religious are connecting to Jewish texts. People who are religious are leading more open lives. It's— I think it's The tension between the religious and the non-religious here is somewhat overrated. Having said that, some of the source of that tension is governmental mandates that treat, give, say, preferences for subsidies to childbearing, which the ultra-Orthodox tend to have much, much larger families. Families are much larger here in Israel than in America generally, secular and religious, but the ultra-Orthodox tend to have the larger families, and they've used their political power to get both subsidies for children, exemptions from army service, and other forms of special treatment that non-religious Jews, not surprisingly, find offensive. So I don't think the alliance of the state with the religion, Jewish religion, has necessarily been a good thing. Many people before me have pointed out that the United States is generally a more religious country than Europe. There's no state religion in America. Most of Europe has state religion. The state doesn't do anything particularly well, and it doesn't tend to lead to good feelings about religion, and has not over time. So when you ask the question, if you take away some monopoly power from the rabbinate, the rabbinic authorities here, are you going to get you might get less kosher food. The answer is you might get more kosher food. It's a lot of resentment of the way that the kosher certification has worked here. A lot of people feel that a lot of times a fee is collected and not much supervision takes place. These are non-religious people who resent that they're paying for something that gives them the certificate they need to serve their religious customers, but don't like the, the hypocrisy of that system. It's a fantastic example, by the way, of the natural assumption most people have that when there's a law, it gets enforced, or when there's a law, the government does it well. Or I had people say to me, "What if we move to a more decentralized system? People won't be able to trust the kosher certification." Like, what, you sure you trust it now? When the government has a monopoly driven by rabbinic oversight, it's, a lot of people say it doesn't work so well. So I'm excited about the role competition might play in the process. I think it'll lead to cheaper kosher food, more kosher food, more restaurants offering certified kosher food that, uh, I think will actually be kosher and will be—

Let me give you a perspective I sometimes hear from Israelis, but I'm going to put this in maybe more public choice terminology than they would use. So I've heard it argued that secular Israelis to some extent free ride upon the more stricter, more religious Israelis who do more to shore up the unity of Judaism or the cultural foundation of the country. And thus, that is part of the bargain. The more extreme religious individuals have to be given some kinds of political preferences to keep them on board. As you know, decades ago, many of the ultra-Orthodox were anti-Zionist rather than Zionist, as they now tend to be. So there is actual pressure where everyone has to be in, you know, the Reicheresque winning coalition. And things like monopoly power over kosher certification, whatever it's going to be, but you have to give them something. Is that an accurate way of thinking about the Israeli political dilemma?

Well, it's not accurate.

Is it useful?

Uh, you know, it's— it— that's a good— I, I've never heard that quite that way. I think, um, by the way, I think many of the There's a wide range of views about what the role of the state should be in the country and whether there should be more, the government should be more sympathetic or less sympathetic to the religious currents here. Jerusalem tends to be a more, quote, religious city than Tel Aviv, but there are plenty of Orthodox people and religious people in Tel Aviv, and there's plenty of non-observant people here in Jerusalem. They tend to have different, rules about how the Sabbath is kept in terms of public services and cultural norms also, of course, play a role. But I don't like that idea. As a Jew, I don't like that idea. As a religious person, I don't like the idea that this implicit bargain that somehow the ultra-Orthodox are what, carrying the water, the ballast, or I don't know what you would call it, the anchoring, the Jewishness of the country. You know, it's not even, I don't think it's an issue for most Israelis to think about it that way. I don't think it would come natural. I think that's definitely a Riker-esque, a reference to William Riker, who I got to be a colleague of for about 5 years at the University of Rochester. He was a wonderful, wonderful man, very insightful and incredible twinkle in his eye. And his work, I think you've probably read it, Tyler. Yeah, he's— he was applying a lot of economics tools in his day, long before other folks. He's kind of, I think, forgotten among our colleagues.

But I like living in Israel and being a citizen there. Make you more or less utilitarian in your moral philosophy?

Why would it? Curious.

Well, for instance, the Israeli policies toward hostages, as I understand them, which is imperfectly. But from what I can tell, I admire these views. The notion that if someone takes hostages, you simply have to look at the longer-term calculation, and you can't cave to every demand. You need to play it quite tough. That seems to me—

is that utilitarian or non-utilitarian?

From my point of view, it's utilitarian. But I'm asking you, I'm not insisting you take my point of view. Living in Israel, has it made you more or less utilitarian?

I'm not much of a utilitarian. I think all of us have some utilitarian impulses by, you know, there's certain cases where it's overwhelmingly clear that as to what too many people who benefit from something or the size of it's so large. But I think in most of the interesting cases, I think it's just, I think our profession, has been so damaged overall by our profession, I mean economics, by the Benthamite calculus. I went back and read— went back, I hadn't read it before. I went and read Bentham in the last year.

Have you read Bentham? I'm a big Bentham fan, though I'm not at all a pure utilitarian. But even on issues such as gay rights or animal welfare or monetary theory or usury laws or tariffs. He's a fantastic thinker and economist. Penal reform.

How about the designated hitter? I mean, you're showing his incredible breadth.

I don't think Bentham wrote about the designated hitter. You know, I disliked it in baseball, but that's maybe topic for another podcast.

Do you still just— it is, but do you— I have to ask, do you still dislike it?

I've become neutral only in the sense that I've stopped caring about baseball. So I would be anti-DH.

And why have you stopped caring about baseball? You haven't moved to Israel.

I've moved to other places and it's too time-consuming. It's hard to watch in chunks. I think it's a less efficient game than it used to be.

Yeah, they've tried to speed it up. They've tried some ways to speed it up. It's really not the— it's not just the total time, it's everything, right? It's not a game made for the TikTok generation.

Or even the YouTube generation, right?

Or even the podcast person. Yeah, exactly. But going back to Bentham, he doesn't— I haven't read a lot of Bentham, but I was surprised at how little he has to say. He gives you this overarching theory that we can take all of our pains and pleasures. So it's very important to emphasize this. And it's The pleasures aren't just physical pleasures, it's not just about gluttony and our animal drives. He knows, he understands pride, and he understands satisfactions and more ethereal and other kinds. But he gets into a problem, which is that after a while, when you start adding them all up, you can't add them up anymore. They can't really be quantified. And he was, as far as I understand, I'd be curious your take on this, he never could solve that problem. He was constantly hope— We try to solve it as economists through money, not literally money, but by putting a monetary value. So I'm going to, in the next 5 minutes, Tyler, I'm gonna say something embarrassing about your past that I've discovered. And I could ask you, it's just an example, Tyler, I don't really know anything about, I can't imagine there's anything embarrassing, but suppose I knew something about you and I said, you know, Tyler, before the show, I said, you know, if you don't, I'm thinking of saying this, how much would you pay me not to say it? And I'm not gonna collect the bribe. So I'm blackmailing you in that story. And in the way economists use the utilitarian framework is everything's a form of that calculus. So the Grand Canyon, the view of the Grand Canyon, is that a monetary transaction? Of course not. But we can ask the question, how much would you pay to be able to continue to see the Grand Canyon for the rest of your life? How much would you pay for your children to be able to see it? And that way, I can trade that off in theory against other things and create a scale. And the problem with that scale, of course, as every good economist knows and many bad ones don't, is that the scale depends on how much money you have. It's not a real scale of pleasure and pain. It's a scale for me. So my ability then to compare my cost and benefits to yours is, I think, zero. But as economists, we don't like that. We want to aggregate. We want to be able to say this is a good policy because the net gains are positive, or this is a bad policy, the net gains are negative. Does that— do you agree with that?

I would put it this way: insofar as we can aggregate, and to make a choice, a policy choice, you have to aggregate in some manner. But I think we aggregate by making moral judgments about different kinds of well-being. And in this sense, utilitarianism is parasitic on non-utilitarian moral theories about which pleasures and pains we count and for how much, and even how we understand what pleasure is. There's not a simple physiological definition as a, you know, a unidimensional measurable variable. So it's all to me parasitic on pluralistic moral value theory, which makes me not a Benthamite. And I think Mill understood this about Bentham. Bentham's utilitarianism is the weakest part of his philosophy. But I think he's a wonderful thinker. And if you read more of him, you'd be very impressed.

Okay, I'm gonna let you create a reading list for me. Not a very long one, Tyler, though. But you can give me 25 pages to start with that I may have missed. I wanna just go back to that for a second, if I could.

Sure.

And since it's my program, and— well, it's not really, it's ours today. So I'm semi-host today, but I wanna ask you this. When I think about marriage, you know, and I'm— my advisor is Gary Becker, his theories of marriage, his mathematical models of marriage. Do you think it's a reasonable thought to compare two people as potential mates for yourself, oneself? In other words, you know, if you marry, let's suppose you, A person's considering two different spouses and you choose one, and they're willing to marry you. And as economists, we say, well, there's revealed preference. You pick the one you thought was better for you. How would you begin to conceptualize what better means in that context? And I think the risk, and I think that the easy way to think about it is more fun, fun broadly defined. Meaning day-to-day life will be better with this person than the other person. That's my expectation. And I think that's a bizarro— the more and more I've thought about this, I'm happily married, but this book I'm writing next called Wild Problems is about these kinds of challenges. Is it really a meaningful statement in the sense that there are so many different aspects of marriage, And in life, in all kinds of choices we make like this that aren't about just what it's like to be around them. It includes things like pride, it includes things like sense of purpose, includes sense like meaning. And so when I take a job, obviously I don't take the job that pays the most necessarily, take the job that I think will be the best, meaning a mix of non-monetary and monetary benefit. Is it really a meaningful statement if one job gives me a huge amount of pride and the other I'm kind of embarrassed about? And how do I, do I really think I can trade those off and put a money, you know, a number on those? Ultimately, a lot of the, this Benthamite calculus to me is about this idea that we can put a scalar, a single number after we've aggregated everything up. And I think that's—

Here's how I would pull that tension. With so many choices, including having kids, You're choosing what kind of person do you want to be, which is fine identity. But once you have two different possible persons, you could be two or more. Which of those gets to do the ordinal choosing? That's indeterminate. And that's another reason why I think pure utilitarianism, whether of the cardinal or ordinal variety, is self-undercutting. It needs to pull in values from outside of the utility itself.

Yeah, and that's the You know, we talked about this on the program with L.A. Paul, talking about the vampire problem, right? Before you're a vampire, it looks pretty grotesque. After you're a vampire, it's fantastic. And what I've suggested, what I'm suggesting in my new book is that, well, it might be fantastic. And so her conclusion is rationality is ill-defined. Mine is, yeah, but I don't wanna be a vampire. It's kind of gross. I don't care how fantastic I think it's gonna be. It might be a— and you get to live forever, I think, if you play your cards right. I just think we bring in other, as you say, other value systems into that calculus, which makes it— I like that phrase.

I have a very easy question for you now. If there's a conflict between the ethnic religious identity of Israel and the democratic nature of Israel, what philosophic standard do you apply to resolve that conflict? Easiest question of the hour, right?

Yeah, you just flip a coin, I think. I talk about that in the book also, by the way. There's a beautiful poem by Piet Hein where he says, and I've heard other people say this, you flip the coin so that you'll know what to root for. And that tells you what you really want. Piet Hein was a great science thinker, mathematician. So here's this guy saying, oh yeah, flip the coin so you can find out what your gut what is really hoping for and use that to make the decision. And that I write about, that's part of what I'm interested in this book about. But when I think about, I think there's a, it's a really interesting tension that you're identifying, especially for a religious person. I don't want to live in a theocracy, Jewish or otherwise. I'm a big believer in competition to make the world a better place. Under some constraints, of course. You know, Israel has— I don't know, was it 30 years ago? 30 years ago, everybody knew that Israel was going to struggle to stay a Jewish state because birth rates were low among the Jewish population. They were high among the Arab-Israeli population. And soon Israel would be in this weird predicament of being a Jewish state where the Jews were a minority. People did not foresee the fall of the Soviet Union and the influx of millions of Russian Jews into Israel. So Israel's really kind of avoided the existential threats that would require a very, very non-democratic response. But it's not a democratic place like America. Any Jew can come live here if they can prove that they're Jewish. But much harder if you're not. And it's not an open, you know, I'm a big fan of open borders, but I do want there to be a Jewish state. So there's an inconsistency there for me that's somewhat troubling. But I'm happy to maintain that the ethnic religious character that you referred to as a Jewish state. And I have to say that, you know, it used to be when I was growing up, Oh, that's pleasant. You know, it's nice to have a Jewish state. The last 10 years, last 5 years, I've actually thought there really has to be a Jewish state. We actually are living in a world where antisemitism was unimaginable, um, 20 years ago, is now increasingly common or, uh, not surprising. And, um, I think it's scary. The so-called Jewish question, you know, what's the Jews' role in the world? What's— when they're not— when they're a citizen of another country, it's back. And, um, hard to imagine. I'm, I'm shocked by it. Are you surprised by that? I know it doesn't touch you the way it touches me or my children, but, um, are you surprised that antisemitism is actually— people get killed for being Jews? In the United States. Weird. Didn't expect, didn't think it could happen. Doesn't happen very often. I'm not paranoid about it, but it's surprising it happened so often.

I would just say I have worked very hard over the last 20 years to try to root out recency bias in my expectations. So fewer bad things surprise me than used to is how I would put it. Because if you look at broader history, right, it's a pretty common event, as are many other bad things. We suffer from recency bias. We think, oh, what we've seen over the 20 or 30 years where the centrality of our own growing up happened is somehow special, but it's not. Yeah.

Yeah, tomorrow will be like yesterday.

Yes.

Until it isn't. I'm curious, I got way overexcited about Theranos and way overexcited about driverless cars. Is that the same phenomenon? Meaning all the hype and excitement that this was different, that they'd solved this problem, that there was gonna be this new world, you know, that optim— I'd call it more of an optimism bias. I wanted to believe that we'd, you know, solved, improved, transformed. Did you fall prey to that?

Well, I think you were right to be excited about driverless vehicles. They're not going to revolutionize the world tomorrow, but I think that will happen., within our lifetimes in a significant way. Theranos, I just wasn't paying that much attention to. I have become successively less skeptical about longevity research, I would say that. But I think it's a long, slow haul and a tough slog. So I don't have a utopian, uh, vision there. But I think, uh, there's so much talent now working on those problems, we'll make some progress on them. Those would be my two responses.

Yeah, it's hard to know. I was just surprised that there were so many smart people and I just got swept up in the excitement. So many smart people who said, you know, within 3 years we're gonna have driverless cars, 35,000 lives saved because there won't be any deaths on the highway. True, there might be a few more pedestrians killed, but it's gonna be a huge advantage for improvement in human life. I think the technical problems there turned out to be quite a bit more daunting. And I think a different kind of bias is we just sort of assume that technology and focus will solve anything. And often it does, amazing. You know, getting a vaccine in a weekend. That was a great moment of human achievement.

Let me ask you another—

So many things turn out to be harder. Another stupid question.

Let's say we think that under current circumstances, a two-state solution would not lead to security either for Israel or for the resulting Palestinian state. Many people believe that. Let's say also, as I, I think you believe, that a one-state solution where just everyone votes would not lead to security for current vision of Israel or even a modified version of it. And let's say also that the current reliance of the Palestinian territories on the state of Israel for protection, security, intelligence, water, many important features of life, prevent—

electricity—

those governing bodies from ever attaining sufficient autonomy to be a credible peace partner, guarantor of its own security, and so on. I mean, from that point of view, what do we do? So we're not utilitarians, right? So we're thinking about what's right and wrong. What's the right thing to do?

Um, there's an expression from the Talmud to answer something on one foot because you can't stand on one foot for very long. So it just means, you know, for some people it means you got 30 seconds. There's some, there's some baseball pitchers who could probably stand on one foot for, um, an hour or two, but, um, it usually means— so you want me to answer this on one foot? And of course there's no There's no answer. And I think I mentioned Micah Goodman a minute ago for his book, The Wandering Jew. His other fascinating book called Catch-67, which explores the contradictions and inconsistencies with different worldviews toward the conflict between Israel and Palestine and the Palestinians in an incredibly thoughtful way. I recommend that book. Tyler Cowen. It's the best book you can read about what's going on here politically and intellectually and emotionally. It's a phenomenal book. So even though, and part of his insight is it's wrong to look for a solution. If I remember the book correctly, I read it quickly, but think about ways to live with it. Think about ways to make life better. Think about ways to move toward improvement rather than fixing it. And I think the American foreign policy establishment has spent the last decades just trying to, quote, fix it. And it may not be fixable. It's hard to admit that as a, quote, rational person. It's hard to admit it as a person who lives here. By the way, I should just mention, people have written me in the last month saying, you know, is it scary there? Would you be afraid to raise your children there if you had young children? It's an incredible place to raise children. Children here run free without fear. They play in a way that American children aren't used to be allowed to play. I played that way growing up. It's still true here. There's very little crime on the streets, very little street crime, very little theft, very little burglary and so on. But there is threat of terrorism. So you're much more likely to get stabbed in Jerusalem than you are in New York City. But of course, it's not common, thank God, at least so far. Right now, but it's serious. And then you got Iran and it's, as I alluded to earlier, it's a tough neighborhood. So I think it behooves, if I may use a word that's out of fashion, it behooves us all to think about ways to both reduce the security threat to Israel and to improve the lives of the people who, of course, in the West Bank and Gaza and elsewhere, who, They're not very good democracies, even though sometimes there are elections. I don't necessarily believe that the person on the street there is being, I don't know what their attitudes are. They can't give an honest answer out of fear. So I wouldn't rely on survey data. I think there's certainly a lot of people in those parts of the world, our neighbors here, our cousins, who just want to lead a normal life and have a better life for their children like most people aspire to. So how do you improve that? I would love to have more commercial interaction, although I agree with you, the trade is not a panacea. Or does that mean it is a panacea? I can't remember. I've got that word. I've tried with that word. But I think I actually— I think there used to be more commercial interaction between the Palestinian population and Israel because it was more peaceful. And now that it's The threat of terrorism is there. Israel's walled off its borders to those neighborhoods and those parts of the world, to Gaza. And, and because it's scary. And that's a tragedy. I just— and they live horribly there. It's a very tough place to live. Gaza. Egypt's not very nice to them either, by the way. They have closed border with Egypt. So I think the challenge is to find ways I don't think, you know, I don't think it's, it's the real problem right now is that Israel doesn't have a negotiating partner who thinks that Israel has a right to exist. So Hamas doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist. It's hard to imagine a two-state solution with that. So how do you improve things along the way? I think you look for ways to do some commercial interaction. I think the other thing is reminds me a little bit of I'll say it this way. This is the Middle East. There are cultural norms here that are not the same as in America. I think a lot of Americans have no understanding of that. Certainly American Jews don't. I don't think American negotiators understand it so well, probably. The role that pride, face, dignity plays, as opposed to say, narrow, quote, narrow self-interest narrowly defined. I think it's much greater for those other intangible things. And personally, I'd like to see Israel try a different kind of move toward normalcy. But I also understand that I'm naive and have only lived here 6 months and have very little thoughtful to say about that that I would want anyone to pay attention to because it's a different neighborhood than where I came from in Maryland., and it's not easily understood. And what might be seen as a generous gesture in Maryland might be seen differently here and vice versa. Something that's harsh in Maryland might be seen very differently here. And so, you know, Israel has its own cultural, Israelis have their own cultural baggage, not just that they're part of this Middle Eastern culture that they share to some extent with their neighbors. Israelis are very proud of their self-reliance. I'll tell you a story. I once, um, this is again, I've only been here 6 months, but this is an old story. It tells you something. I'm flying out of JFK. I have to get to Israel to visit one of my kids who's studying here for the year. There's a special program for the parents and small window for me to get here in time to enjoy the program with my son. And JFK is, every flight's canceled. It's snowing just this, relentless hour after hour blanketing the city. And I leave Midtown Manhattan to go to JFK and the flight's still, my flight on El Al, the Israeli airline, is still not canceled somehow, but I can't, the cab can't go faster than 20 miles an hour. So it takes about, there's no one on the road. It's like me and the cab's the only car on the road. Takes us about 45 minutes or an hour to get to JFK and at 20 miles an hour. And I get to the gate, the desk to check my bags. And they asked me the security questions, which El Al does differently than anybody else. And they take my bag. And I get to the front desk and I say, you know, to get my boarding pass. And they say, "Can I help you?" I said, "Yeah, I'm on flight such and such." And I said, "We're not leaving tonight, are we? We're not really gonna fly in this. I mean, this flight's gonna be canceled. I mean, I'm 2 hours early, right? And it's still gonna keep snowing the whole time." And she looks at me and she says, "You know, our pilots are, they're all from the Israeli Air Force. And the rule here is it's the pilot's call. If they can decide they're uncomfortable flying and cancel flight anytime." She said, "As long as the airport's open, we're going to fly." Because those pilots, they're going to fly. They're confident that they can fly through that storm. And there's something beautiful about that, something scary. It was a little bit, I was really excited because I wanted to get to see my son, but I was thinking, "Hmm, I don't know if that's always my mentality." That's the Israeli mentality. We'll get it done. We'll take care of it. It'll work out. And it's a pretty, we're joking a lot, not joking, but we're talking around these issues of bluntness and, and this culture here. But, um, there's also some— there's a vitality and national pride here that's so missing in America these days. Um, you know, I'm very worried about the future of America, and, uh, it's a different set of worries here, but they're not bad worries relative to what America is dealing with, it feels like. Are you optimistic about the future of America as a as a country?

I would put it this way: I'm increasingly optimistic about economic issues, technological issues, and even American democracy, contrary to most people. But I am increasingly worried about the possible collapse of geopolitical stability in places such as Taiwan, Ukraine, parts of Africa. So I'm not sure if I'm optimistic or pessimistic as a whole. I'm relatively optimistic about North America compared to the rest of the world, for sure. Because it's geopolitically secure, right? Wow. Because it can't be invaded again, and it has enough of its own resources, right? If we were cut off, we would in different ways manage.

Of course, we could destroy ourselves from within. I'm now wearing— putting my American passport— I'm still American citizen also. With the way we could destroy ourselves, are you sure?

And they never say yes. There's a lot of hemming and hawing. But I think it's become a kind of protective talisman to over-worry about American democracy because people feel angst about the content of what it's producing, which a lot of that I would agree with. But I think it will continue, and American democracy has looked and sounded ugly for most of its history, getting back to recency bias. And maybe it sounded better in the '80s.

Great example.

But for American democracy to be lunacy is in fact part of our history. But let me close with two final questions. One is super easy, the other is very hard. The easy question.

All right, sure. Can I have the easy one first?

It seems to me Israel faces a pending or even current shortage of unskilled labor and is also committed to the idea of being a Jewish state. And countries like Switzerland that I never thought would take in a lot of outsiders have done so because it makes economic sense. So how will Israel address this question? That's the easy one.

That's easy one. Oh great, is everything going to be robots and driverless cars?

But you don't believe in those anymore, so who does all the work?

No, you know, I, I think robots are pretty powerful, and I— yeah, but we're not going to have driverless cars for a while. We're going to still have drivers. Um, you know, I think that again, I'm, I'm a newcomer. There's a lot of of debate here that I've not been paid close attention to before I arrived about immigrants from other countries. There's a lot of people here from Asia who do some of the jobs that Israelis don't wanna do at market wages here. And there's people from Eritrea and other places. And it's really a national identity issue. That the Israeli people will work out through their really complicated and not so perhaps robust democracy. Pretty robust, it's 70 years now. It's pretty amazing. Heading towards 75. But I think it's a bit of a fallacy. I know you don't subscribe to it, but a lot of people do that, "Oh, well, if we don't import workers to do those jobs, no one will do them." And that's not true. What'll happen is if you have something of a market economy, the wages rise and they become more attractive to the native population. Now, immigrants aren't needed. And some of the things with the prices rise so much, they won't be done anymore. People won't want them at those higher prices it would take to pay for those services. So I don't think it's a— there's a temptation always to look for the efficient solution, the one that's financially, wise, but there are other aspects. And I think Brexit and other decisions that populations are making in the modern world are a view that there are things more important than money. And I don't think that's ever gonna change. I think, as I've said before, a good economist understands that, a bad economist focuses on it. An episode, I don't know when it's coming out, might come out before this, I think it's now coming out, I can't remember. I think it's before this with Megan McArdle on Roger Scruton's book, "Where We Are," which is about the role that place plays in our emotional wellbeing and our heart and our decision-making. And I think those things are really important and people care a lot about 'em, especially here in Israel. You know, their connection to the land, their connection to their country, their sense of identity that we alluded to earlier that I think is extremely important here. So I think, you know, Israel will make the decision. They might be willing to pay a price. Israelis might be willing to pay a higher price for a bunch of stuff to have it done by Israeli sources or not get done at all. America's got that same issue, right? It's the same challenge. A lot of people like the idea of inexpensive food, fruit and vegetables picked by inexpensive labor, home repairs done by inexpensive labor, all immigrant, often illegal perhaps. And a lot of people like that. A lot of people like what comes with that, which is more interesting life, more interesting types of people. But some people don't like it. And the fact that they're gonna pay a higher price for some things, that doesn't surprise me that they're willing to make that trade.

Okay, and here's the hard question. And it's hard because you actually have to solve it. In your new job, what is your next task? Yeah.

Oh, well, that's a difficult one.

But you have to do it. That's much harder than the others.

But I have to do it by myself. And then I don't have to pretend I understand something I don't understand, like preventing warfare among people who've been fighting for a long time, tragically. The thing I really have to do is that in, about 1 hour, we have our first gala dinner here of alumni, which we haven't had because of COVID It's an amazing thing right now in Israel, right? We've closed— this is December 2021. We've closed our borders to the United States, which means that my youngest son can't come visit us for winter break like he planned to. A lot of people can't come to their kids', their grandchildren's life cycle events. And until I'd say about a month ago, when Omicron was just a glint in somebody's eye or throat, people here were living a totally normal life. I mean, it's just totally normal. We have these, we have this, we have these mask mandates, which, which, like on the buses, you're supposed to wear a mask. Even the driver's not wearing his mask. Excuse me, they're all wearing it. Nobody's wearing it over their nose and mouth. Very few. The older people are generally, but the younger people either wearing it under their chin maybe a little over their mouth, but not their nose. And I think with Omicron, the level of anxiety has risen here some. I assume it's risen there where you are as well. But we've got a gala dinner tonight, and there's going to be 125 alums of this place. We've only had 5 years of graduates. So that's the first thing I'm doing, but that's not really your question. What am I doing that I can share that's not too secretive or important? I'll tell you another thing we're doing, which is glorious. Leon Kass is our new Dean of Faculty. And he's convened a— he's 82, taught the great books at the University of Chicago and St. John's for over 3 decades, often with his wife, Amy, who's passed on, but who was an incredible teacher also. And Leon's just a incredible visionary educationally. So one of the thrills of this job is sitting in on the faculty colloquium, which he started, and listening to my colleagues, my faculty members, like say my, our faculty members talk about a text that they love. And we have a faculty member, Assaf Ambari, he's a great Israeli novelist, at least I hope so. I can't read his books, they're in Hebrew, they haven't been translated yet, but they're popular, I think, among the right people. And anyway, he taught a class last week and a half ago. And he chose a poem by Yeats. And the poem was "After a Long Silence." And I'm a Yeats fan, I love Yeats. And I picked up this poem and I looked at it. And I thought, I have no idea what this poem's about. It's trouble. And then I read it again before the colloquium. I couldn't get anything out of it again. And for 90 minutes, we studied it with other faculty members from all different departments. And I got some light, a lot of light, actually. It's a beautiful poem. It doesn't have much rhythm to it. The rhythm is disjointed. There's some lines that are in pentameter, some aren't. And Asaf said, "This is Yeats. Don't you think he did that on purpose? You don't like the rhythm of the poem?" Maybe you ought to think about whether this is part of the poem. So it was an amazing, glorious experience. That's my favorite thing about working here, that and going to choir practice with the students here and pretending I can sing. And I'm looking forward to seeing them tonight. So it's kind of a cheap ducking of your question, but it's the best I can do, I think.

Russ Roberts, thank you very much.

Thank you, Tyler. This is EconTalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more EconTalk, go to econtalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for EconTalk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.